When night falls and the suits and ties have all been tucked away, a magical world emerges from the darkness, setting the cities of London, Berlin, Paris, New York, Las Vegas, LA, and San Francisco ablaze as the rest of the world sleeps. This is the realm of the night performer, the drag queen or king, the burlesque dancer, the fetish artist, and now of LA-based photographer Samantha Fielding, who has devoted three years of her life to telling the stories of the world’s most gifted and ingenious underground personalities.

When New York City-based photographer David Prince embarked on his journey to Bhutan, he left with no fixed ideas about what he would find, preferring instead to immerse himself totally within the lifestyles of the country’s traditional yak farmers, Buddhist monasteries, and the vast Himalayan mountains that enveloped them all.

For Beautiful by Night, San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker James Hosking chronicles life in Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, the one and only gay bar left standing in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that decades ago, was renowned for its thriving LGBT community. In tracing the nightly routines of three of its older drag queens— Donna Personna, Collette LeGrande, and Olivia Hart, Hosking traces the rich history and uncertain future of drag in the crime-ridden area.

As soon as you see Page, you know there is something special about her. She has the ethereal elegance of Grace Kelly, married with the glittery, gender-bending, art-punk edge of downtown New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s. This was something legendary drag queen Linda Simpson noticed about the transgender performer and documented, along with the rest of the era’s drag scene, with a simple 35 mm point-and-shoot camera. In color, of course. Because if anything was ever colorful, it was drag.

Sara Hopkins is an Atlanta-based documentary and fine art photographer. About this series, Costuming the Archetypes, she writes:

I began this work as part of an exploration of myself. Part of humanity is exploring the unknown, the differences, and the similarities of any aspect of life. For me, masculinity and femininity are faux expression of the archetypes Man and Woman. I felt so strongly about this, that I wanted to incorporate the viewpoint into a very simple, but compelling work. I sought out Camp Drag performers because not only do they express the appearance of masculinity and femininity of the Archetypes, but they also question gender bending and what it means to be a man or woman through exaggeration and humor.

Romanian born photographer Alin Dragulin completed a B.A. in Painting from Portland State University. These days, he spends his time between Portland and Los Angeles, specializing in creating images that convey his unique sense of visual humor. This set of photos belongs to an ongoing series documenting the changes that occur when boys enter their teens. These portraits were taken in February 2008, when they were all aged eleven. The next series will be shot in February 2010, when they will be thirteen years old.

The many expressions of identity that exist on the gender spectrum is a subject of tremendous depth and breadth, though it has largely existed underground in realms secreted away from the masses. It has given birth to a culture so innovative and rich that, 50 years after Stonewall, the underground has emerged and center itself with impeccable aplomb.

Over the past half-century, artists like Mariette Pathy Allen have been deep in the trenches, using their work to fight for dignity, respect, and rights — taking on the tyranny of ignorance, bigotry, and oppression.

In celebration, The Museum of Sex presents Mariette Pathy Allen: Rites of Passage, 1978–2006, a stunning survey of the artist’s archive that includes photographs, interview transcripts, personal correspondence, and materials from her career working with trans, genderfluid, and intersex communities over the past four decades.